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Comment by direwolf20 | Hacker News Reader

The other system you're using that isn't Postgres can also go down.

Many developers overcomplicate systems. In the pursuit of 100% uptime, if you're not extremely careful, you removed more 9s with complexity than you added with redundancy. And although hyperscalers pride themselves on their uptime (Amazon even achieved three nines last year!) in reality most customers of most businesses are fine if your system is down for ten minutes a month. It's not ideal and you should probably fix that, but it's not catastrophic either.

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What I’ve found is that, particularly with internal customers, they’re fine with an hour a month, possibly several, as long as not all of your eggs are in one basket.

The centralization pushes make a situation where if I have a task to do that needs three tools to accomplish, and one of them goes down, they’re all down. So all I can do is go for coffee or an early lunch because I can’t sub in another task into this time slot. They’re all blocked by The System being down, instead of a system being down.

If CI is borked I can work on docs and catch up on emails. If the network is down or NAS is down and everything is on that NAS, then things are dire.

good luck doing anything if kafka is down though

>The other system you're using that isn't Postgres can also go down.

Only if DC gets nuked.

Many developers overcomplicate systems and throw a database at the problem.

Wow, TIL there was an atomic attack on the capitol in October!

DC=Data Center

DC!=Washington, DC

I wondered, but the lack of "the" before "DC" tipped me toward interpreting it as the place name, especially as AWS us-east-1 is in Northern Virginia. Thanks for clarifying!

Which system is immune to all downtime except the DC getting nuked?

Properly designed distributed systems.

Challenge: Design a fault tolerant event-driven architecture. Only rule, you aren’t allowed to use a database. At all. This is actually an interview question for a top employer. Answer this right and you get a salary that will change your life.

No, those go down all the time. AWS had three nines last year. Bitcoin had the value overflow incident.

Credit cards still worked…

Email still worked…

Again, there are fault tolerant distributed systems out there that don’t rely on a single point of failure.

That’s not to say failure doesn’t happen.

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